Sam was a scientist, an MD/PhD researcher in infectious diseases. Eleanor thought of him with remorse, as the outlier, neglected in the tumult of three boys under five; but hers was a minority view. Rupert, in his stiff way, and her father, in his, had worked to fill the void she had left, and in their coalition, they had, remarkably, succeeded. Sam was insightful and observant, his senses alive to those around him, with a barbed sense of humor and a stubbornness that often passed for principled objection. He was slow to anger but, once aroused, slow to forgive. Like his brothers, he loved his mother, almost without criticism. He saw himself less as the odd one out than as the gravitational center of the five brothers. “I am the keystone,” he told his mother when he was ten. Of the five, he was closest to his father and, Eleanor thought, his father’s favorite. He was, if not his brothers’ favorite, then the one they found least irritating.
Jack, the only artist, was the most talented, the most driven. A jazz trumpeter, he was interested in little besides music. People, hearing he was from a large family, pegged him as the youngest; he had the sweetness and self-centeredness of the baby, indulged by older brothers as well as parents. “I love the trumpet more than I love food,” he told his mother. “It’s the brassiest of all instruments. It struts.” My id, Eleanor thought.
Tom, who was the baby, missed having someone below him to push around and often felt the weight of the older four as oppressive. He would refer to himself as the runt of the litter, though he was the tallest and the best athlete. There was never any unalloyed good news, no winning without losing for Tom. He was the only one of the five who’d been in therapy. Among his grievances, he resented that he was born in the ’70s, not the ’60s like the others, a different generation. He was a federal prosecutor, working in the white-collar crime unit in the Chicago US Attorney’s Office, “having a not-too-bad time of it” going after insider traders. Eleanor wondered if his decision to be a prosecutor was his way of arming himself against his big brothers. He too married Jewish, a niece of Jim Cardozo’s wife, Anne.
All five had gone to Princeton—Harry, Will, and Tom as tennis players. Eleanor had wanted them to go to Yale, their grandfather’s old school, while Rupert, along with Trinity, their high school, had pushed Harvard. Harry, being Harry, beat his way to Princeton and brought the rest along. Growing up in New York City, they liked the country all right while they were there, but after graduation, they gravitated to cities. Tom insisted he’d never have gotten into Princeton if he wasn’t a legacy, seeming to forget he had been a highly ranked tennis recruit with 1400 boards; in fact, it was Jack, with a patchy academic record, who presented a challenge to the admissions office. Still, Princeton took him. They didn’t want to risk losing Tom, who’d be applying in two years, or alienating the older brothers; and the head of Trinity’s music department told admissions that Jack was the most talented music student he’d ever taught. “Reject him and regret it,” he wrote.
For thirteen years, from 1980 through 1992, there was at least one Falkes on campus; for nine of those years, there were two. Harry blazed the trail, writing his way into a junior history seminar in the fall of his freshman year and making the varsity tennis team in the spring. The younger ones walked onto campus already celebrities; everyone seemed to know who they were. Harry joined Quadrangle—he didn’t want to join an eating club that didn’t have women members, and he didn’t like bicker. His brothers followed but even Quadrangle was too elitist for Tom, who dropped out. Harry liked Princeton best, then Will, then Sam, then Jack, then Tom. After Rupert’s death, Harry endowed a scholarship at Princeton in his father’s name. The others thought he was gunning for a seat on the board of trustees.
“Why did we all follow Harry to Princeton?” Tom asked Sam when his fifth reunion was coming up. He wasn’t planning on going.
“Habit,” Sam said. “We always did what Harry did back then. Also laziness.”
Will graduated summa and won a Marshall, spending three years at Cambridge, which pleased Rupert no end. Harry and Sam graduated magna and went on to Yale, Harry for law, Sam for medicine. That too pleased Rupert, who joined the Corporation after Sam was admitted. Tom graduated cum and was awarded the Scholar-Athlete Award at graduation. “Rafa Kohn, the soccer player, should have got it; he’s brilliant. I just wallop the ball,” he told his parents. He went to Berkeley for law school; “I want sunshine and fresh air,” he said. Jack graduated “with great relief,” but clinched his place in the Princeton pantheon by being invited onstage to play with Wynton Marsalis at a jazz concert his junior year. Marsalis told the crowd he’d heard there was a “white trumpet prodigy at Princeton.”
The family money was part of the constellation—the boys all had Phipps as one of their middle names, a kind of calling card of its own—and Rupert and Eleanor gave generously. But there was more to them than the obvious markers; a dashing, romantic aura hovered about the five Falkeses, the kind usually ascribed to quivers of remarkable or highly marriageable sisters, like the Mitfords or the Cushings; other boys and men were always having crushes on them.
They’d all married or partnered in their twenties or early thirties, and there was the whiff of Eleanor or Rupert in all their choices. Except for Sam’s boyfriend Andrew, they were all fond of their in-laws, who went the second, third, and fourth mile to welcome them to the family. Andrew felt toward Eleanor and Rupert the antagonism of the provincial boy. “Who still uses fish forks?” he asked Sam the first time he had dinner at West Sixty-Seventh Street. “And is there always a maid serving dinner and a cook cooking it?” Sam regarded both questions as rhetorical bloodletting and didn’t answer them directly. “My father was an orphan, left on the church steps,” he said. Andrew snorted. “He’s a hero, then, completely self-made. I know where I came from, and so do they: the other side of the tracks.” When Eleanor and Rupert gave Andrew an elegant Omega gold watch for his thirty-fifth birthday, an expensive gift but not embarrassingly expensive, Andrew decided the acuity of the choice was an insult. “It’s too thoughtful,” he said to Sam. “I’ll tell them not to get you any more gifts,” Sam said. “No, no,” Andrew said. “I don’t want to be thought insulting.” Andrew had wanted a Cartier tank watch like Sam’s.
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Eleanor insisted on a family dinner the night before Harry left for Princeton his freshman year. “No dispensations,” she said at breakfast. “That includes everyone.” Rupert nodded. “All hands on deck at 23:00 Zulu,” he said. The boys groaned. “How does Zulu work with daylight saving time?” Sam asked, working the calculation in his head.